ITT: Post your favorite passages by Joyce

[Anonymous No.8452667]

Of Simon Daedalus's voice:
>"It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don't spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the etherial bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness...."

[Anonymous No.8452749]

Obligatory "snow was general over Ireland" passage

Also, many bits of Finnegans Wake
>In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!

[Anonymous No.8452930]

From Portrait:

>“His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or in revery, he had heard their tale before. He saw her urge her vanities, her fine dress and sash and long black stockings, and knew that he had yielded to them a thousand times. Yet a voice within him spoke above the noise of his dancing heart, asking him would he take her gift to which he had only to stretch out his hand."

[Anonymous No.8452940]

sam's a gay cunt

[Anonymous No.8452956]

>>8452749
that just blew my mind.

[Anonymous No.8452960]

The final paragraph of Lotus-Eaters is top notch.

[Anonymous No.8453011]

>big fat fellows

[Anonymous No.8453015]

well this thread has convinced me never to read joyce

[Anonymous No.8453017]

>>8453015
Most of his stuff is purposely obscure

[Anonymous No.8453022]

>>8453017
it's not the obscurity that is putting me off

[Anonymous No.8453102]

>>8453022
what is it that is putting you off?

[Anonymous No.8453108]

>His face was glowing with anger and Stephen felt the glow rise to his own cheek as the spoken words thrilled him. Mr Dedalus uttered a guffaw of coarse scorn.
>—O, by God, he cried, I forgot little old Paul Cullen! Another apple of God’s eye!
>Dante bent across the table and cried to Mr Casey:
>—Right! Right! They were always right! God and morality and religion come first.
>Mrs Dedalus, seeing her excitement, said to her:
>—Mrs Riordan, don’t excite yourself answering them.
>—God and religion before everything! Dante cried. God and religion before the world.
>Mr Casey raised his clenched fist and brought it down on the table with a crash.
>—Very well then, he shouted hoarsely, if it comes to that, no God for Ireland!
>—John! John! cried Mr Dedalus, seizing his guest by the coat sleeve. Dante stared across the table, her cheeks shaking. Mr Casey struggled up from his chair and bent across the table towards her, scraping the air from before his eyes with one hand as though he were tearing aside a cobweb.
>—No God for Ireland! he cried. We have had too much God In Ireland. Away with God!
>—Blasphemer! Devil! screamed Dante, starting to her feet and almost spitting in his face.
>Uncle Charles and Mr Dedalus pulled Mr Casey back into his chair again, talking to him from both sides reasonably. He stared before him out of his dark flaming eyes, repeating:
>—Away with God, I say!
>Dante shoved her chair violently aside and left the table, upsetting her napkin-ring which rolled slowly along the carpet and came to rest against the foot of an easy-chair. Mrs Dedalus rose quickly and followed her towards the door. At the door Dante turned round violently and shouted down the room, her cheeks flushed and quivering with rage:
>—Devil out of hell! We won! We crushed him to death! Fiend!
>The door slammed behind her. Mr Casey, freeing his arms from his holders, suddenly bowed his head on his hands with a sob of pain.
>—Poor Parnell! he cried loudly. My dead king! He sobbed loudly and bitterly.
>Stephen, raising his terror-stricken face, saw that his father’s eyes were full of tears.

[Anonymous No.8453134]

>>8453102
the shitness

[Anonymous No.8453137]

>>8453134
of your taste in prose?

[Anonymous No.8453138]

>>8453102
It's just ostentatious puff.

1. I don't find the writing at all attractive, I find it tiresome
2. There's no substance

[Anonymous No.8453142]

>>8453138
Oh, so you just have bad taste, then.

That's perfectly understandable. SOMEONE'S gotta have bad taste, right? Just stay off /lit/ forever, please.

[Anonymous No.8453146]

>>8453142
Good refutation.

What do you think is the message within those passages?

[Anonymous No.8453149]

>>8453146
which passage specifically?

[Anonymous No.8453151]

>>8453149
>>8452749
this one for starters

[Anonymous No.8453157]

>>8453151
I don't know. I haven't read Finnegan's wake because it's incredibly dense and full of allusions and puns and so forth.

Immediately, it's a play on words of The Lord's Prayer, but beyond that I'm sure there is more.

[Anonymous No.8453161]

>>8452667
>>8453157
Ok, so you can't say but you're sure there's more.
That's some profound literature
Try OP's passage

[Anonymous No.8453162]

>>8453146
>message

Oh boy

[Anonymous No.8453166]

>>8453108
I've always wanted to know more about the historical context of Parnell. I've read the Wikipedia article, but it either doesn't do him justice or Joyce massively overstated how important he was.

[Anonymous No.8453167]

>>8453161
I'm not claiming to understand Finnegans Wake, and I'm not vouching for it.

I do like his other works, though.


OP's passage is describing a man's voice.

[Anonymous No.8453171]

>>8453167
Not him but I agree the writing can be tiring. I wish he would cut the bullshit and just get to the point

[Anonymous No.8453172]

>>8453166
How did Joyce overstate his importance? As far as I can tell, Parnell was just a very important symbol of Irish independence, so his downfall and the Church's insidious involvement with it left a pretty deep impression on the Irish citizenry. Joyce doesn't imply that Parnell was some great historical figure because of the things he accomplished, he seemed to have more of a local, symbolic significance.

[Anonymous No.8453176]

>>8453171
>the point

I don't think that's the point of Joyce's writing.

[Anonymous No.8453181]

>>8453171
>the point
Maybe literature's not for you, my friend

[Anonymous No.8453182]

>>8453176
And that's why I lose interest in his work

[Anonymous No.8453185]

>>8453181
Most literature isn't about the prose

[Anonymous No.8453186]

>>8453172
>insidious

The Church was only preserving its own moral teachings. Parnell shouldn't have gotten caught.

[Anonymous No.8453190]

>>8453181
Joyce isn't a didacticist by any means, I agree, but the plots are too puffed up to convey story in a satisfying way.
I just don't get the appeal

[Anonymous No.8453191]

>>8453182
What is wrong with literature as an exploration of form and aesthetic? Is that not a point in itself?

What is with this cancerous worship of practicality?

[Anonymous No.8453192]

>>8453182
ah well just for the record I've never read anything by Joyce.

I was just pretending because it's fashionable to like him on /lit/

[Anonymous No.8453195]

>>8453191
I've never understood aesthetic/form worship as an inherently worthwhile thing. I generally don't listen to etudes either

[Anonymous No.8453197]

>>8453186
that's true I guess I meant insidious from the point of view of Simon Daedalus/the other Irish nationalists: the Church's involvement no matter the motivation seemed to have created a lot of disillusionment

[Anonymous No.8453198]

>>8453195
every story's already been told.

The only thing new is the form.

[Anonymous No.8453202]

>>8453195
What about Liszt's and Chopin's concert etudes?

[Anonymous No.8453207]

>>8453198
Form exploration is boring and generally comes across as wankery
But I guess he's the most recent author I've read and in older works there's more of a plot/motif focus

[Anonymous No.8453211]

>>8453202
You get the point I was making

[Anonymous No.8453213]

>Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings, merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.

From Ulysses

[Anonymous No.8453215]

>>8453213
durr uhhh....

but like...

whats the point??

[Anonymous No.8453217]

>>8453191
there's a sweet spot where the two meet. both extremes have their fans but it's silly to believe a militant superiority of one over the other

[Anonymous No.8453221]

>>8452667
To all the people complaining about Joyce's lack of substance: I think you don't give him enough credit. Ulysses has some of the most emotional scenes in all of literature. It does have a lot of academia plastered across its surface, but embedded within is a truly comprehensive and beautiful rendition of human experience. Joyce may not have been a philosophically deep thinker, but I don't think that literature should be more about the senses than the ideas. Ideas can make a book more beautiful, but they should not be the sole purpose. That is what philosophy is for.

[Anonymous No.8453222]

>>8453215
Here we see the deep understanding of the joyceans on full display

[Anonymous No.8453232]

>>8453222
u mad, cuck?

[Anonymous No.8453238]

>>8453232
Mad that you didn't check my trips

[Anonymous No.8453313]

>>8453161
The excerpt OP posted came at the end of a song Simon Dedalus was singing at a bar. Simon Dedalus isn't the most remarkable man and ever since his wife's recent passing he's been slipping further into alcohol and financial troubles. But that moment when he was singing at this little local pub, he seemed to soar high above that. And for Bloom listening, brooding over his own family troubles, it was a moment of transcendence.

[Anonymous No.8453314]

>>8453191
it is a point in itself but you have to be lying to yourself to think that joyce is successful in doing this, or at least that any of the passages posted so far in this thread are any good at highlighting it. so what if there's a play on words for the lord's prayer? how is that 'style' how is that 'good prose'? what's the point?

his exercises in language are inconsequential and limited by the fact they depend on a 100 year-old understanding of how language and aesthetics function. it's naive and by extension a failed project. there is something to creating substance out of style but this is style for the sake of experimentation with writing, but it's a failed experiment. compare the modernists in painting from the early 20th century like picasso, whose experiments in style actually carried the weight of academic art at its essence, not just cheap appeals to allegory and christian lit. picasso, duchamp, matisse, kandinsky, malevich and even early surrealism all had more profound impacts on their art than joyce. the only people who write like joyce now are pseud monolingual undergrads with no understanding of language

[Anonymous No.8453374]

>But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.

[Anonymous No.8453396]

"PRIVATE CARR
Here. What are you saying about my king?

STEPHEN
(Throws up his hands.) O, this is too monotonous! Nothing. He wants my money and my life, though want must be his master, for some brutish empire of his. Money I haven't. (He searches his pockets vaguely.) Gave it to someone.

PRIVATE CARR
Who wants your bleeding money?

STEPHEN
(Tries to move off.) Will someone tell me where I am least likely to meet these necessary evils? Ça se voit aussi à Paris. Not that I... But by Saint Patrick...!"

[Anonymous No.8453397]

>>8453314
>i wikipedia "intellectual" topics to get a dilettante level understanding so i can namedrop and shitpost on 4chan: the post

take notes kids, this is what autodidactism does for you

[Anonymous No.8453452]

>>8452749
>her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!
That's a reference to her female parts, right?

[Anonymous No.8453459]

as Stephen lies in the infirmary at Clongowes and thinks he's dying (portrait)

Dingdong! The Castle bell!
Farewel, my mother!
bury me in the old churchyard
beside my eldest brother
my coffin shall be black,
six angels at my back,
two to sing and two to pray
and two to carry my soul away.

[Anonymous No.8453477]

>>8453314
I laughed out loud but, truth be told, I'm a bit scared by people who think like this.

[Anonymous No.8453512]

What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman?

Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising, and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.

[Anonymous No.8453531]

>>8453512
I loved this chapter.

[Anonymous No.8453681]

>>8453397
>>8453477

nice arguments. i'll print these out so i can look at them before i make another comment about joyce. i'm glad he's had such a profound influence on your thinking

[Anonymous No.8453985]

Stephen Dedalus watched through the webbed window the lapidary's fingers prove a timedulled chain. Dust webbed the window and the showtrays. Dust darkened the toiling fingers with their vulture nails. Dust slept on dull coils of bronze and silver, lozenges of cinnabar, on rubies, leprous and winedark stones.
Born all in the dark wormy earth, cold specks of fire, evil, lights shining in the darkness. Where fallen archangels flung the stars of their brows. Muddy swinesnouts, hands, root and root, gripe and wrest them.

[Anonymous No.8454074]

>>8453681
yes yes you are very clever. -pat on head-

here have, this toy ball. do you want a piece of candy?

[Anonymous No.8454133]

>>8453314
>the only people who write like joyce now are pseud monolingual undergrads with no understanding of language

This hurt desu senpai

[Anonymous No.8454163]

>>8453213
this is from what chapter?

[Anonymous No.8454272]

>>8452667
This reads like a parody of itself, which is actually what Ulysses reads like.

[Anonymous No.8454323]

>>8454272
no shit nigga the first line is parodic

[Anonymous No.8454450]

BRRRRRRRRRRRRT

T. Nora's Hole

[Anonymous No.8454456]

>>8453452
who cares

[Anonymous No.8454610]

>>8454456
I certainly don't. Only losers care about stuff like that. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to ignore the whole thing. Not gonna bother me anymore. That's right.

[Anonymous No.8454626]

>>8453162
This so much, dear God

[Anonymous No.8454637]

>Shop Illicit, flourishing like a lordmajor or a buaboabaybohm, litting flop a deadlop (aloose!) to lee but lifting a bennbranch a yardalong (Ivoeh!) the breezy side (for showm!), the height of Brewster's chimpney and as broad below as Phineas Barnum; humphing his share of the showthers is senken on him he's such a grandfallar, with a pocked wife in pickle that's a flyfire and three lice nittle clinkers, two twilling bugs and one midgit pucelle.

[Anonymous No.8454659]

>>8453314
1. You haven't read Ulysses
2. You have no idea what the fuck you're talking about if you think Joyce isn't super influential and also that Duchamp/Picasso/etc. haven't inspired a fair share of undergrad hacks
3. Maybe actually try reading up on the themes and (gasp) maybe actually try reading one of his books instead of trying to make judgements on the man's whole oeuvre from selected passages in a /lit/ thread

[Anonymous No.8454698]

All of these excerpts posted are bad examples of writing, just dressed up with a little more capability. A bunch of purple prose, a bunch of cringey alliteration–––it reads like a college kid's jack off session.

[Anonymous No.8454707]

>>8454698
>a college kid's Jack off session
Cool, I have a new way to describe this board

[Anonymous No.8454717]

>>8453314
i hope you actually feel embarrassed by this post in real life after some reflection

[Anonymous No.8454725]

they were yung and easily freudened

[Anonymous No.8454732]

>>8454725
I want to kill myself

[Anonymous No.8454770]

>>8453217
this

[Anonymous No.8454785]

>>8452667
>endlessnessnessness
i like this

[Anonymous No.8454797]

>>8454785
Why?

[Anonymous No.8454806]

Is Ulysses poetry?

[Anonymous No.8454819]

How can Ulysses even be translated into other languages?

If I'm not a native English speaker, am I fucked on getting the full experience?

I feel like ending myself.

[Anonymous No.8454900]

>Don't eat a beefsteak. If you do the eyes of that cow will pursue you through all eternity.

[Anonymous No.8454925]

>>8454900
>gets dubs that looks like eyes in post about eyes

[Anonymous No.8454934]

>>8454819
Of course.

You should try to read it in English.

[Anonymous No.8454941]

>"Gone too from the world, Averroes and Moses Maimonides, dark men in mien and movement, flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the world, a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend.”

[Anonymous No.8455151]

>>8453146
>literature always needs to have a """message"""

[Anonymous No.8455845]

>>8453138
>there's no substance
>making this judgement from quotes
Do you dismiss authors based on Facebook posts or something? Why don't you read some of the literature surrounding these quotes before you say "it has no substance", because otherwise you have no idea what you're talking about you're just repeating criticisms you think are relevant.

[Anonymous No.8455955]

Ho! Ho! Ho! Lynch, the jejune jesuit! the jujube jew! Lynch the nigger! Dedalus! Dedalus! Dedalus! Race war, now! Helter skelter! Ho! Ho! Ho! We're the master race!

[Anonymous No.8455975]

>>8452667
>My sweet little whorish Nora I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twice when I read your letter. I am delighted to see that you do like being fucked arseways. Yes, now I can remember that night when I fucked you for so long backwards. It was the dirtiest fucking I ever gave you, darling. My prick was stuck in you for hours, fucking in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty buttocks under my belly and saw your flushed face and mad eyes. At every fuck I gave you your shameless tongue came bursting out through your lips and if a gave you a bigger stronger fuck than usual, fat dirty farts came spluttering out of your backside. You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole. It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman when every fuck drives one out of her. I think I would know Nora's fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women. It is a rather girlish noise not like the wet windy fart which I imagine fat wives have. It is sudden and dry and dirty like what a bold girl would let off in fun in a school dormitory at night. I hope Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face so that I may know their smell also.

[Anonymous No.8455978]

Sunset found her squatting in the grass, groaning. Every stool was looser than the one before, and smelled fouler. By the time the moon came up she was shitting brown water. The more she drank, the more she shat, but the more she shat, the thirstier she grew, and her thirst sent her crawling to the stream to suck up more water.

[Anonymous No.8456242]

>>8454659
>it's a patrician joyce readers post the worst excerpts of joyce thinking they're good episode

i don't know if it says more about joyce or more about this board

[Anonymous No.8456277]

From Ithaca

>If he had smiled why would he have smiled?
>To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.

[Anonymous No.8456324]

>>8456242
True, they're not his best, but I'll say for any author it's difficult to represent how good a line is out of context. It just doesn't work

[Anonymous No.8456348]

>>8455955
LOL good one my fellow white male

[Anonymous No.8456384]

>>8456242
post a good one then oh master of joyce